In the month following the Assembly of the elders, Merovic was taking an inventory and reviewing the assets that he had accumulated, he used this time to sort his chaotic thoughts: “I can’t believe that men in the tribes sleep together.” at an earlier time, Merovic made a run to one of town's merchants during the later end of morning, to collect payment for one of the new models of loom that he developed, he arrived at the person's home and found him in bed with another man! This by itself didn’t bother Merovic over much, but the man in question was a reputed womanizer, so he was simply stumped by the sight. After a faux inquisition on the details, he made a strange discovery, and his mind whirled with thoughts: “Business slumber parties are a thing. People are sharing a bed, like a bunch of pre-pubescent girls, and chatting until they fall asleep, and the people in question are men! I have heard the phrase “misery acquaints a man strange bedfellows”, but to see that people were being bedfellows, and not doinking, is a world-shattering revelation.” Merovic sighed and cast off the odd thoughts.
The past year was met with some successes, but he didn’t reach all of his goals, his age was a serious damper on his ability to persuade people. The Gauntalic peoples were very concerned about prestige and status in the tribe, in a way you could say looks made the man. He had to learn the hard way about how to identify the movers and shakers, who to squeeze, and who to grease. Thankfully, dress codes were a dead giveaway; while there were signs of it going out of fashion, the vast majority of the tribes still wore a lot of the old traditional clothing, from when the druids were predominant. Armbands, neckbands, circlets, and fine-woven garments: since much of the people in the Gauntal viewed long hair as a source of pride, hair beads, braids, and hair accessories were all a sign of wealth; to the great disapproval of Merovic, the men cared the most about their hair and spent the money to prove it.
Typically, the more you wore the more it showed off a particular status of wealth, but the quality of what you wore decided where you were in the social hierarchy. Everyone who could wear gold would; to a certain extent but only the king, chiefs, elders and their families could use circlets and neckbands of gold. Silver was predominately worn by the elders, skilled craftsmen, and veteran warriors, if you were at this level or above you could wear silver as a circlet, or neckband. Lastly was bronze, which everybody had, and everyone but slaves could wear any piece they wanted.
A pertinent question to ask would be why would wearing any amount of wealth show off their status? The answer was elegant in its simplicity, the Gauntal bred a strong warrior culture, a keep-what-you-kill kind of attitude. If a person had something you liked, you could challenge them to an honor duel with the jewelry as a bet. This had the effect of proving a person's prestige because if you wore it, you could protect it; it also had the effect of keeping people relatively humble and friendly to each other, because if you couldn’t defend it, then you depend on the goodwill of your neighbors, and most worked extra hard to keep each other in good graces. The system had the potential to be abusive, but for the most part, it worked, because everyone you would ever reasonably know is in the tribe. The people’s moral and common sense tended to avoid wanting to make enemies with the same people they would be seeing in the following days/months/years/til they die.
This knowledge had a solid impact on Merovic’s rate of success when he was peddling his ideas. While he had designs that had been successfully adopted by key implementers, he also had ideas that were refused for one reason or another, sometimes because of time constraints, some because they were resource-intensive, and others because the idea seemed too outlandish to work. The project pitch on the aqueduct, the chain of watermills with worm drives, and the water hammer were all killed in the cradle. Merovic was not discouraged, he didn’t have the resources or the influence now, but in the future, he would.
The silver lining to this cloud is that the taxes his father had been receiving had increased due to the improvements in the weaving, farming, and carpentry industries. The people of the Gauntal use a lot of wood, every industry they operate utilizes some wood somewhere in the supply chain or in its general operations. Everyone uses wood or charcoal made from wood as fuel, most tools are made from wood or contain it, the same goes for the armaments, and lastly, it's heavily used in construction and containers. The introduction of the lathe was a serious game changer in the speed and precision of anything that could be fashioned into a circle or a cylinder. As soon as he had better improvements in metallurgical components or processes, he would introduce more intricate lathes which would kickstart the next improvement cycle.
Merovic both indirectly and directly benefited from these improvements, indirectly in the form of prestige and reputation, which would be needed in a few years. His direct benefits started occurring recently, his father started giving him an allowance from the extra taxes he had been collecting. Granted the taxes were nothing too impressive, but many a little makes a mickle. The Kingdom only had a right to collect 1% in tax, and the records on tally sticks, proved that was certainly the case.
If the kingdom needed more than the established tax, it had to depend on donations to settle the balance; of which could only be compelled by moral urging. The issue of donations never became a problem in the day-to-day management of the Kingdom, most of the people were strongly bound by ties of kith and kinship; problems that could be solved by money, were no problems at all, because gold and silver did not make babies alone. The self-interest of the tribe tended to furnish a compelling enough interest to be a moral force. If morality ceased to be a compelling factor, honor duels could generate money.
Merovic tallied up all of the money he had saved; from donations, allowance, and market dealings: It totaled 15000 denarii in value, which equated to a little under 150 pounds of silver; in the form of coins and ingots of gold, silver, and bronze. Merovic was absolutely thrilled with the horde of wealth that he had collected. A pile of cash was cool, but it was no substitute for rolling around and bathing in treasure. He wasn’t at that point yet, and ingots were not as comfortable to roll in as coins, but someday he vowed to get there.
After collecting his bag of accounting tally sticks, he walked to the bi-annual market. The city had a regular market but twice a year, all the regular foreign merchants set a date where they would bring a large inventory of goods. It created a festive atmosphere, and it was the best chance to get rare and exotic goods without traveling outside of the Kingdom. Merovic wandered the stalls and visited the wagons and carriages parked in camps all around the city’s outskirts. The dock was full of ships from Avalon and Danr with a few Rumelian vessels scattered amongst them. The city was alive with activity, while it was incredibly small in comparison to the ancient cities of the Empire, it felt packed with people at this moment.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
After scouting out the market, Merovic made his plan of action; he struck first the supplies of sulfur, he tasted it a little before his purchase, buying the ones that tasted faintest of rotting eggs. Then he made way to collect lime, coal, lead, kaolin, quartz, porphyry, a few pieces of glassware, gallons of olive oil, a small list of various herbal and food seeds, and a small number of miscellaneous items for other experiments. Merovic lastly placed a standing order for more mineral products, slaves, and seeds; he ended up paying 1/3 of his total spending budget, entered into a few contracts to purchase more products and left happily.
The boy then went to the slave market; for Merovic it was his first time seeing such an affair, and it was different from what he expected. He expected to see a bunch of broken naked people in cages, with fat iron chokers wrapped around their necks and leashed together with chains like rabid animals. To be sure, there was a couple of people in that situation, and they did have a rabid look to their eyes; it was not the situation of the majority of the slaves. The slaves scattered around the market grouped into stalls near their sellers; some were despondent, some were glad, some were sad, and others apathetic.
They painted a nice picture of racial and cultural diversity, as though all of humanity shared the indignity of being the proletariat, and waited for an uprising of labor. However, that thought was just an idle flight of fancy for Merovic; the oddity that stood most out to the boy was the skewed ratio of men to women and their prices. They were selling 3:1 men to women slaves and the prices were in a 1:5 ratio, not only were women in the minority but they were almost five times the cost. Merovic was shocked by the scene, while he has never had a harem, not that it mattered to him, but to not even have the choice to afford it was like a dagger to the heart. Life was cruel, and outside of some of the tribal women, they didn’t look like slaves but rather stuck-up princesses. The worst part was that the cost of the few women that were sex-slaves, started at 5250 denarii and unskilled women were around 4500 denarii; unskilled men would be around 250-500 denarii, and skilled men would be 500-4000 denarii. The youth felt a moment of righteous outrage, the price of sex-slaves was a crime against human decency, and he felt that there was some malevolent force in the cosmos that contrived to create some sort of slave ceiling or slave price gap, to oppress and degrade humankind.
Merovic sighed and shook away his daydreaming, and went to work looking for new employees. The first to catch his eye was one of the feral males in a cage; he was an unkempt Rumelian, his tired eyes bore holes into the boy, and when Merovic drew near he reached out his arm like a wild tiger and tried to grab the curious youth. The man's meaty hands, were but inches away from the impassive adolescent, yet the man said not one word, his silence was like an answer all to itself. Merovic looked at the man calmly and asked: “How did you become a slave?”, the man did not answer. The youth pressed further: “So you volunteered to be a slave?”, the man maintained his silence. Merovic then pontificated: “I see, you must have been a coward and a deserter, you remain in that cage because you have unclean urges, and the beast within has a taste for boy meat.”
The man stared in surprise and then he baroquely laughed: “Thats very good little boy, why don’t you set me free, and we can find out.” Merovic nodded and then quipped: “Certainly, but not on my dime, unlike some caged deviants, others have to work for a living and support themselves; perhaps if you lay on your back, you can generate enough sesterces to purchase your freedom.” Merovic politely offered that suggestion. The man paused at that response and the boy continued: “So you intend to sit there and do nothing, and remain a slave? Or do you think you are a billy badass, and you’re just going to break free and fight your way to freedom? If that was the case, you would never have been captured, or made a slave in the first place.”
The man coughed, but had no response to that statement. “look I can buy your freedom if you are cheap enough, but I want to know why you are worth setting free, if you don’t have an answer, then we can pretend I never offered in the first place.”
The man considered his answer: “My name is Vitruvius Lupernicus, I was a legionary in the Legio XXX Ulpia Victrix, I have served 15 years as a praefectus fabrum, I was not a deserter, and I am not a deviant, ...yet. The man proffered.
“Will you be returning to the Empire with your freedom?
“No, nothing remains for me there.” Vitruvius’ eyes glazed over momentarily with that comment.
“Would you like a job? The pay is negotiable. If you have nowhere to go, I would be happy to take you in. I need a lot of help with the devices that I am making.”
“Sure kid.” He replied, and Vitruvius pondered on what the kid would be making that he would need an ex-legionary to build. The idea of being hired by a child humored him enough to seriously consider the proposal.
With that swooning evaluation, Merovic paid the slave merchant and purchased the rest of the slaves he found interesting. In the end, he was left with only one denarius to his name, and he took his time, but he wept for the passing of his innocence: his wallet a pathetic remembrance of denarii, silver pieces walking upon a trail of tears, and never to be seen again. “Sic transit gloria mundi” The adolescent exhaled.
His work was a bittersweet success, and so he returned home and organized his new employees and loot. He had acquired a small team of workers, slaves could not be considered a loyal workforce, but they were his and he didn’t have to share the manpower with the elders of the tribe. His relief was further compounded with the attainment of a Rumelian engineer, by the name of Vitruvius. Now he had a second pair of hands that could understand how to build his devices.
In the following days, Merovic familiarized his staff with the designs and work they would be doing. The work and tasks would be nothing short of sweaty back-breaking misery.
Two weeks later; the efforts of his men in the refinement of saltpeter were rewarded with a child's toothy smile. The men having the laborious job of making charcoal from scratch, and then having to boil and refine the liquid from the nitrified soil, finally reached their long-awaited purpose. A few hundred pounds of soil was gradually converted into a crude saltpeter, weighing 50 pounds. Some of this saltpeter was then refined by boiling and cooling repeatedly over a period of days. Afterward, Merovic created several sample products: Containing a mixture of refined saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, which were ground and mixed with a precious distillation of alcohol from the local mead, they were then dried in the sun. Eventually, a batch of products was completed, comprised of different ratios of the raw ingredients. The process took days for a small batch of samples to reach fruition.
The men's pain and suffering were rewarded, they had successfully tested and formulated a primitive black powder mix. When Merovic showed off the results of the best sample mix to his men; they cheered in awe at the strange combustible powder. The flash and burn lasted a brief second, leaving a black scorch on the stone it was tested upon. Their applause turned to confusion, a dirty Vitruvius then looked at the youth and asked: “Its very fancy, but what is it for?”
Merovic’s grin became malevolent as he revealed some other prototypes, and explained what they could do.
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